Network technical requirements and operational needs continue to evolve towards a direction in which information and services can be transmitted rapidly and at low cost to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Growing bandwidth needs have presented the need for optical communication at scales and distances smaller than previously envisioned. The silicon photonics platform, with its ability to manifest CMOS-compatible photonic devices, is promising for use in next-generation optical links. However, as optics penetrates deeper into the chip temperature stability becomes more important due to silicon's high thermo-optic coefficient (1.86×10−4/° C.) accompanied by an appreciable modification of the refractive index in the presence of rising temperature and resulting in performance deterioration of photonic devices and systems. Correspondingly, at power densities of 100 W/cm2 in modern microelectronic Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chips, the problem of heat dissipation is a major challenge even with the most advanced packaging technologies. Local temperature stabilization becomes impossible with thousands of devices with varying temperature profiles across a single chip.